Dossier 14-15: Gender, Civil Society and Citizenship in Algeria

Women in Algeria must negotiate
their access to the public sphere in a society torn between the residual
patriarchal reflexes of the modern state and Islamist revivalism. Feminists in
Algeria, while critical of the patriarchal nature of the state, continue to call
for its intervention to halt the Islamist upsurge and to implement social
policies based on a model of universal citizenry.

In 1993, I attended a
ceremony of trance dancing called "Benga", organized by the only group still
performing in the town of Tebessa where I then lived.[1] The Tidjania group
of Tebessa is a residual branch of the larger African Islamic sect that has
practiced trance dancing for healing purposes, in particular as therapy in
exorcising "bad spirits". The Benga dance relies on a highly organized drumming
team, accompanying religious litanies celebrating the prophet Muhammad, which
leads the dancer to fall into a "liberating faint".

Most striking about the
Benga performance was that attendance was mixed: men and women, young and old
together, faced the drummers, whose leaders included a veteran elderly woman
reciter of the religious litanies. The men and women dancers performed in turn,
falling into trances in front of the assembly. The position of their bodies
expressed total abandonment (although women's and girl's thighs were promptly
covered), unusual in such a predominantly patriarchal local society with strong
Bedouin underpinnings.

Charmed by the intensity of
drumming, I stood to dance, albeit prudishly, closely watched over by my husband
and sisters-in-law whose glances discreetly reminded me that I bore the status
and prestige of their name in the local community! A typical petty bourgeois
family with small business and professional profiles acquired over four
generations, they perceived themselves as the ideal family, combining
traditional and modern value systems - typical of a neo-patriarchal
micro-society.[2] I was welcomed on
the basis of respecting this eclecticism - that is, watching the Benga as a
folkloric manifestation but not participating. I was bound to display attitudes
and behavior informed by the puritanism and self-discipline of both
scripturalist Islamic education and modern rationalism.

The end of the Benga
spectacle restored the prevailing order, with its gender separation, class
boundaries and linkages. Today, this image of the Benga strikes me as a powerful
reflection of gender debates in Algeria within a problematic of nation-building
and New State legitimacy, hypothetically at odds with traditional allegiances
and local kin loyalties. Discussing the position of women in Algerian society
today amounts to summoning the "demons" of patriarchy and neo-patriarchy. In
this invocation, we will call upon the demons of kin, society and state in their
gender "trances", so as to gauge the limits surrounding women's access in
Algeria to individuality and citizenship in the process of nation state building
in the form of res publica.

For more than a decade and
a half, the state's populist measures co-opted various popular trends thanks to
economic efficiency and social egalitarianism. The most notable co-optations
were around the agrarian reforms; the trade union movement; women, who were
integrated into education, health, and the national labor market, and religious
conservatives, whose endorsement of socialist policies were offset by the
promulgation of Islam as state religion. The establishment of religious colleges
and institutes by the state would harbor the later more translucent
fundamentalist movement of the 1980s.

The technocratic nature of
state and nation-building during that period produced the notion of citizenship
as a "commodity". Within a dynamic of rapid social change, from a pre-industrial
to a dependent post-colonial formation, universal enfranchisement could not be
incorporated as a gratuitous right. Rather, it was brandished as a "barter good"
in exchange for carefully tailored allegiances. This is where universal access
to the public sphere was negotiated against the preservation of ascriptive
allegiances regarding women's limitations as individual decision-makers in the
domestic space.

State and the Spectre of Kin vs.
Women

I have
previously referred to feminism and fundamentalism as comprising Algeria's rites
of passage to democracy.[3] The eclectic and
populist official ideological discourse melds socialism and Islam (Article 2 of
the Constitution stipulates that Islam is the state religion), as well as
traditional communitarianism. As such it has provided a thriving source of
legitimacy for later conservative claims against the modern ideal of
citizenry.

The
1982-1984 National Popular Assembly (NPA) debates on a family code delineating
the "ideal woman" in Muslim societies have helped to expose the demons of
conservatism in civil society, long repressed by a technocratic neo-patriarchal
state. The Algerian case demonstrates that state and kin are not necessarily at
odds when it comes to limiting women's legal status as domestic
decision-makers.

There is a widely held
belief that Arab women, marginalized in the public arena, exercise authority in
the domestic boundaries of the family.[4] In fact, it is not
in relation to women's limited access to the public realm that the hesitations
of the state are most apparent, but rather in restrictions it places on them as
individual decision-makers in the domestic realm of the family. In this
cloistered space, the state has supported resurgent Islamist attempts to
construct a handicapped citizenship for Algerian women. In the early 1980s, the
Family Code bill relegated women to a "minority" status.[5] In order to ensure
that their access to citizenship did not affect the familial sphere, women were
asked to sacrifice their full-fledged status within the family.

The process of enacting the
Family Code shows all too clearly that the male political elite perceive greater
women's involvement in the management of family matters as a factor threatening
domestic stability and social cohesion. Paradoxically, an active role for women
in the domestic arena would entail a fuller citizenship for them but would
undermine the ideal harmony of an Islamic universe on the one hand, and
patriarchal potency, on the other.

Our story begins with the
legislative session of 1982. This followed the so-called Berber Spring of 1980
and the detention of feminist and Islamist leaders alike, which marked the first
expressions of civil disobedience and made visible the plurality of Algerian
civil society.[6] The NPA adopted a
personal status bill regulating domestic relationships and delineating women's
status as wives and mothers under the guardianship of husbands and fathers. The
bill expressed the intent to preserve a dominant patrilineal familial structure
and the subsidiary status of women within it. The bill also introduced limits on
women's participation in the public arena by conditioning their right to work on
husband's permission - a provision nowhere to be found in the Shariand
its official schools of interpretation but abundantly manifest in Algerian
customs of women's effacement and dependence on male kin.[7]

During the NPA debates, some ten
delegates tried in vain to remind their peers of constitutional provisions on
gender equality and the universalization of citizenry to both sexes. But they
faced staunch conservatives who opposed the faintest idea of equal legal status
for men and women. The Minister of Justice, in his introductory remarks, left no
doubt as to the position of the modernizing state builders: to construct "the
legislative reference, within the framework of Islamic principles, which ought
to guarantee the rights of a woman, and her position as partner of man and
mother in society". The chair of the Assembly's Administrative and Legislative
Commission clarified the matter: "Marriage is based on equality between husband
and wife, except in legal responsibility, and familial authority, a natural
prerogative of the husband".

Some conservative delegates
considered the bill to be "a counter-strike against those impregnated with
secular views". Others affirmed that the bill represented an opportunity to
"reject secularism because it has made women into merchandise".[8] Fear of secularity
eloquently encompasses a fear of individuality and the sexual and social
empowerment of women. To counter this, conservatives stressed not only marriage
but its polygamous form as the best guarantor of male control. "Polygamy is a
humanitarian action which helps reduce the rate of divorce", said one, "and has
a raison d'être in case the wife is either sterile, seriously ill, or the
husband fears marital discord".

The bill, not enacted
during the 1982 legislature, was discreetly withdrawn in the face of the
onslaught of conservatives, marches organized by independent women from
professional circles, and the protests of a few war veterans concerned about the
promulgation of such retrograde provisions. These dissents were early highlights
in the annals of "civil disobedience" in post-independence Algeria.

Ten years later, on the eve
of the first multi-party legislative elections scheduled for January 1992, the
Islamist parties headed by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) pronounced the end
of secularism in Algeria and the establishment of the Islamic Republic.[9] The organic ties
binding the nostalgia of "specific socialism" to the puritanism of the Islamists
was brought into the open. The process was helped by the so-called
representatives of civil society - the NPA delegates. The primary catalyst
remained the issue of legislation and women's status, in a word:
gender.

Although the 1982 Personal
Status bill was withdrawn, pressure soon mounted from conservative quarters to
issue family and personal status legislation in accordance with Shari
injunctions and traditional mores, especially those pertaining to the
predominance of kin over individual, in particular over individual females. On
June 9, 1984, the Qanun al-Usrah (Family Code) was enacted as Law no.
84-11. All its provisions, without exception, confine women to a relational
model of dependence, be it in marriage or divorce, in legal representation, or
in matters of succession.[10] Of particular
relevance to a discussion of women's marginalization from domestic
decision-making was the desperate manoeuvring of conservative delegates during
the 1984 debates on polygamy as an unconditional provision in the Code. Polygamy
is far from widespread in Algeria. Both local customs and the growing
atomization of family structures under the pressures of commercialization and
urbanization have discouraged polygamous unions. In fact, advocates introduced
polygamy in the Assembly in order to enforce social control by ensuring the
durability of the extended family and the primary role and status of women as
reproducers.

Family Code, Reproduction and
Jihad

The
1984 Family Code merely reproduced provisions of the Shari as elaborated
between the eighth and twelfth centuries by Muslim legal scholars. In one
deviation, though, the government bill would have made polygamy conditional upon
the consent of the first wife as well as the second. This was sufficient to
provoke an uproar that turned the debates into a conference on polygamy.
According to Article 8 of the proposed Code:

It is permitted to contract
marriage with more than one wife within the limits of Shari if the motive
is justified, the conditions and intentions of equity provided, and after the
consultation of the preceding and future wife. Either wife may take judicial
action against the husband, or request divorce should he ignore her refusal to
consent.

This
constituted a departure from the more permissive original Qur'anic verse,
(chapter 4, verse 2):

If you fear that you cannot
treat orphans with fairness, then you may marry other women who seem good to
you: two, three or four of them. But if you fear that you cannot maintain
equality among them, marry one only or any slave girl you may own. This will
make it easier for you to avoid injustice.

Conservative delegates
swiftly and violently denounced the Article as "heretic". The minutes of the
official journal disclose no trace of interventions by secularist members. Out
of 60 interventions reported in the minutes, 45 opposed placing conditions on
polygamy. Some delegates thought it unrealistic to allow a judge to decide on
conditions of equity, and that the matter should be left to the husband's
conscience.[11] According to the
Arabic version of the clause on divorce (Article 53), women can only "request to
be made divorced" by husbands, through a judge (hence tatleeq and not
talaq). For some delegates, even this ought not be granted to wives:
"Polygamy cannot possibly be invoked as a reason for tatleeq, since it is
legitimized by Shari".

Perhaps the most startling
intervention held that:

Polygamy is not to be
disputed, whatever the case, for a Muslim state is one based on Jihad,
and this calls for the involvement of men alone. To whom will women be left in
the case of Jihad, and how will society be protected from subsequent depravity,
if widows cannot find parties to marry? Polygamy is therefore a must.[12]

The idiosyncratic logic of
patriarchal conservatism, however, was not the last word. Despite the hysteria
of intransigent conservatives over the adoption of conditional polygamy,
representatives of the neo-patriarchal elite managed to outmanoeuvre them and
include the government proposed article. The chair "scientifically" explained
that "… since Algeria's population is comprised of 48 percent males and 52
percent females, four girls out of 52 would remain unmarried, and would fall
prey to non-Muslim unions or even depravation; therefore polygamy is justified
in a statistical sense".[13]

This illustrates the state's
recourse to science as a legitimating discourse. The state inserts itself as the
"knower", relying on technocrats and experts whose competence cannot be easily
disputed by lay people. The crux of neo-patriarchy in Algeria is that it relies
both on transcendental worldviews to confront radical and secular opinion, and
on technical, rational "proof" to dissuade conservatives. This typical
manoeuvring of Algeria's political class - the military and bureaucratic elites
– went unnoticed as long as the processes of state-building concerned the
infrastructural public arena - industrialization, mechanization of agriculture
and, above all, systematic socialization via extended schooling.

A Durkheimian model of
"social cohesion", within a framework of seemingly "organic solidarity" was
promoted as the dominant mechanism for coping with social change. The
enchantment of change stopped on the doorstep of the domestic familial arena
where mechanisms of "mechanical solidarities" stood firm against the state
incursions. In Algeria, family confines are, by and large, designated as "horma"
(sacred intimacy), a term that stems etymologically from "haram" (forbidden).
"Horma" also refers to the wife or, invariably, all the women of the family.
Where other spheres of social organizing remained docile and even welcoming,
gender has stood up to the confusing eclectism of the state's legitimation
discourse.

Our
understanding of social change has long been under the spell of
conceptualizations born out of the positivist and evolutionist approaches of
19th century European thinkers who were themselves deeply influenced by changes
which took place in the industrial and colonial stage of capitalism. Such social
theorizing has all been done in the absence of gender analysis. Women are
subsumed as "man", which not only occludes their particularity but subverts
social thinking. How are we to address the mimetism of so-called developing
societies, their docility concerning structural integration into an
international capitalist system and their fierce opposition to "modern"
normative conceptualizations of gender roles as well as secular knowledge? How
can we explain the relapse of complex societies whenever women attempt to attain
some kind of self-decision-making and individual empowerment?

At this point social
theorizing needs to include a more subtle conceptualization of the various
patterns of social reproduction, within what I call the "resilience of
patriarchal reflexes". Although the scope and concern of this article does not
allow for more detailed considerations of the analysis of "patriarchal
reflexes", it is essential to point out that the occultation of women as makers
of history, and as central actors in the dynamics of both reproduction and
social reproduction, has certainly affected perceptions of social change thus
far.

The fears
of the Algerian delegates concerning the "dilution" of gender roles and status
are comparable to the fears of their American conservative counterparts. Without
elaborating, there are interesting similarities between the panic of Algerian
MPs when confronted with the possibility that Algerian women might take control
of the process of reproduction, and by extension social reproduction, and the
forceful fight by conservative members of the US Congress to deny American
women, as individual decision-makers, access to abortion. Such outcries
principally express a protectionist reflex of women's reproductive role, and
implicitly reject their sexual empowerment as a menace to reproductive statuses
as wife and mother. Women's access to citizenship is jeopardized by the
problematic of reproduction.

Albeit superficial, the
comparison of Algeria and the US hints at the residual patriarchal reflexes of
the modern state, be it in its advanced capitalistic phase or dependent
formation. Its legitimation hinges on the preservation of the private familial
arena, and its basic reliance on women's reproductive role and domestic
status.

In
Algeria, women's access to the public arena - that is, to citizenry – holds sway
within a clientelist dynamic. Consider the generally favorable integration of
women in public processes, such as education, health and services. The state
offers these packaged as "constitutional rights", but uses them as "favors". The
majority of women, facing a very reluctant if not hostile social context,
perceive them as such. In exchange, women are expected to endorse a weak and
inadequate status as citizens by accepting their effacement from major
decision-making processes, especially those pertaining to personal status and
family legislation.

Algeria's female citizens
look upon the state as a liberator, despite the formidable regressions it has
engendered in matters related to personal status. Today, feminists in Algeria
continue to call upon the intervention of the state to halt the Islamist upsurge
and implement a model of universal citizenry within the framework of a
democratic republic. But state legitimation has been seriously undermined by the
more universal appeal of the pan-Islamic revolution. One might expect that, in a
last bid to hold political power, the dominant nationalistic elite together with
the army will continue to manoeuvre within the clientelist relations it has
established with feminists and democrats alike. Yet the de-legitimation process
seems irreversible. The contention for power will, sooner or later, have to stem
from civil society at large, discarding the state as the omnipotent
decider/protector in Algeria. It is then that the bid for citizenry will be open
for all to construct. For women, this means a long and painful
process.

Boutheina Cheriet teaches
comparative education and the sociology of education at the University of
Algiers. She is presently a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in
Washington, DC.

[1] I propose here a
maverick use of anthropological observation, whereby the observer is thoroughly
embedded in the processes as actor. I enjoyed seemingly ideal conditions of
liberation, individualization and professionalism, guaranteed by my status as a
public employee, a university professor. My marriage into an influential family
of Tebessa, a small town (approximately 700 km southeast of Algiers) with
residual tribal configurations, returned me to statuses, roles and behavior
expressive more of kin constraints and allegiances than of a free and autonomous
individual directly relating to state institutions and structures. My status as
wife led me to play along two contrary registers: appear as a professional,
efface as a wife.

[5] The official
reference for personal status in Algeria is al-Qanun al-Usrah (the Family
Code). The documents cited here include "Law no. 84-11", The Official Journal
of the Algerian Democratic and Popular Republic, (Algiers, June 9, 1984);
Parliamentary Debates no. 126, 1982; nos. 46, 47, 48, 52, 1984, The Official
Journal of the National Popular Assembly (JOAPN), (Algiers). These latter
represent the minutes of the 1982 and 1984 debates on the family code. All
documents are in French. Translations by the author.

[6] Between 1980 and
1983, various movements of civil disobedience characterized the Algerian
political scene for the first time since independence in 1962. Three types of
contestation manifested themselves almost simultaneously: the ethnic Berber
demands for official recognition of the Berber Amazigh language and culture; the
Islamists' demands for the total Islamisation of Algeria and feminist demands
for full implementation of women's constitutional citizenship rights, threatened
by the then Personal Status legislation. This diverse opposition to state
monolithism heralded the October 1988 riots marking the delegitimation of the
one-party system.

[7] For an
insightful account of Qur'anic verses pertaining to the religious, social and
legal position of women, see Abdel Hamid al-Shawaribi, Al-Huquq al-Siyassia
lil-Mar'a fil-Islem (Women's Political Rights in Islam), (Alexandria:
Mansha'at al- Ma'arif, 1987).

[8] JOAPN 126, p. 3. One might
mistake this remark for a Weberian observation on secularism and the
transformation of social relations.

[10] See Boutheina
Cheriet, "Specific Socialism and Illiteracy amongst Women: A Comparative Study
of Algeria and Tanzania", (PhD dissertation, University of London Institute of
Education, 1987), p. 195.